Dying for a safe flight

What is being lost in the protests against the TSA's scanning machines, or the near-sexual-assault patdown subjected on passengers who refuse the scanning, is that the scanning machines are themselves going to kill some people.

The machines are used, of course, to detect potential weapons of one kind or another. They've been nicknamed "naked body" scans because they visually strip the subject down to his/her bare skin.

The pilots' union has protested that flying at high altitudes already exposes crews to high radiation levels. The TSA responds that each scan emits only one-thousandth as much radiation as a typical chest X-ray. Not a chance, replies Arizona State University physics Prof. Peter Rez, who calculated the dose to be one-fiftieth to one-hundredth of a chest X-ray. Even so, the increased radiation exposure for passengers is, as the TSA claims, minuscule.

But minuscule does not equal zero. Prof. Rez calculates the chances of a passenger contracting fatal cancer from just one scan to be one in 20 million. As of 2008, the latest year for which numbers are available, there were 809,611,003 air passengers, representing 100 million (rounded) individual Americans who flew.

If all 100 million people take eight scans per year, and if one scan will kill five of them, then the statistical risk being forced upon us is that 40 Americans per year will eventually die from taking the scans.

The risk is higher for people with increased sensitivity to radiation, such as children and people with some kinds of medical conditions, according to scientists at the University of California at San Francisco.

Prof. Rez adds that the country's 250,000 commercial aircrew may receive up to 250 scans per year, meaning that in addition to the 40 passengers dying, two aircrew will die.

The problem, says Prof. Rez, is that the risk of dying from the scans is just as high as the risk of dying from an airline-related terrorist incident. The scans provide no "payoff," mathematically speaking. It's zero sum.

These risks obtain only with X-ray scanners, not millimeter-wave scanners. The TSA is using some of the latter. You can tell which is which - millimeter-wave machines are grayish-white and cylindrical. The X-ray scanners are blue with two walls.

So you decide to take your small child through the grope search rather than have her face the increased risk from X-ray scanning? Well, the grope is not only incredibly invasive, it's terrifying:



An El-Al consultant observed after stricter security measures were instituted after 9/11, "You do not have an airline-security system, you have a passenger-harassment system." Several years on, it's only worse.